Counterfeit Self, The

By MARINA KRAKOVSKY

Published: December 13, 2009

Wearing imitation designer clothing or accessories can fool others -- but no matter how convincing the knockoff, you never, of course, fool yourself. It's a small but undeniable act of duplicity. Which led a trio of researchers to suspect that wearing counterfeits might quietly take a psychological toll on the wearer.

To test their hunch, the psychologists Francesca Gino, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely asked two groups of young women to wear sunglasses taken from a box labeled either ''authentic'' or ''counterfeit.'' (In truth, all the eyewear was authentic, donated by a brand-name designer interested in curtailing counterfeiting.) Then the researchers put the participants in situations in which it was both easy and tempting to cheat.

In one situation, which was ostensibly part of a product evaluation, the women wore the shades while answering a set of very simple math problems -- under heavy time pressure. Afterward, given ample time to check their work, they reported how many problems they were able to answer correctly. They had been told they'd be paid for each answer they reported getting right, thus creating an incentive to inflate their scores. Unbeknown to the participants, the researchers knew each person's actual score. Math performance was the same for the two groups -- but whereas 30 percent of those in the ''authentic'' condition inflated their scores, a whopping 71 percent of the counterfeit-wearing participants did so.

Why did this happen? As Gino puts it, ''When one feels like a fake, he or she is likely to behave like a fake.'' It was notable that the participants were oblivious to this and other similar effects the researchers discovered: the psychological costs of cheap knockoffs are hidden. The study is currently in press at the journal Psychological Science.

Could other types of fakery also lead to ethical lapses? ''It's a fascinating research question,'' says Gino, who studies organizational behavior at the University of North Carolina. ''There are lots of situations on the job where we're not true to ourselves, and we might not realize there might be unintended consequences.''